California cheese trail pairs perfectly with state's famous vineyards

Among Cowgirl Creamery’s most popular cheeses are (from left) St. Pat, Red Hawk (several top prizes), Mount Tam and Wagon Wheel.Martha Lowrie
/ For Postmedia News

Cowgirl Creamery’s location in scenic Point Reyes makes and sells its award-winning cheeses, along with other items and food to take away or eat in.Martha Lowrie
/ For Postmedia News

Chickie Vella is the third generation to carry on the family’s Vella Cheese Company in Sonoma, best known for its distinctive—and award-winning—Dry Monterey Jack, an aged hard cheese that can be grated like Parmesan.Martha Lowrie
/ For Postmedia News

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The phone call woke Sheana Davis just before dawn. On the line was a chef at Kendall Jackson, one of Sonoma’s world-renowned vineyards and one of Davis’s key clients. He needed 100 pounds of Davis’s award-winning Delice de la Valle cheese. Pronto. Otherwise, the winery’s tasting room risked running short at a special wine-and-cheese pairing event later that day.

Davis rushed to her downtown Sonoma store, grabbed the cheese from her storage fridge, dropped it into a large cooler and then drove 20 minutes to meet the chef at a coffee shop halfway to Kendall Jackson. Mission accomplished, she returned a few hours later to open Epicurean Connection, her gourmet food shop steps from the town square where she also prepares and serves light meals.

Davis, a dynamo who, among other activities, puts on an annual five-day cheese conference that attracts vendors and cheesemakers from across the United States, personifies why visitors to Sonoma these days are saying, “Hold the wine and pass the cheese.”

Indeed, the local tourism authorities have created a 100-mile cheese trail that both hugs the rugged Pacific coastline and traverses inland wineries and rolling pastures. There’s a downloadable map at www.cheesetrail.org and a free app that includes stops in neighbouring Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Called the Sonoma Marin Cheese Trail, the route highlights 27 locations including creameries that offer public tours. The featured cheesemakers are among the best in the world; several have won U.S. and international competitions.

Davis’s Delice de la Valle, for example, a rich mixture of triple-cream cow and fresh goat milk, has won top prize at the American Cheese Society’s annual competition. The nearby French Laundry, one of North America’s top restaurants and a three-star Michelin establishment, is a major customer.

Besides running her store, catering and teaching cheesemaking, Davis hosts a monthly potluck supper for local farmers. It’s “farmer central” for the region’s burgeoning artisanal cheese industry, a chance to share stories and talk about natural foods, especially cheese. “I love cheesemakers,” she says. “They are creative, bohemian people. And we all have a passion for cheese.”

But she recognizes passion is not always enough to pay the bills. “Cheese is the romance,” Davis says. “My shop is the reality.”

Davis learned the art of cheesemaking a few blocks away in a former brewery. Her mentor was the legendary Ig Vella whose daughter Chickie Vella and her cheesemaker son are the third and fourth generations to operate Vella Cheese Company, still in the same location. Its signature Dry Monterrey Jack, an aged cheese with a sweet, nutty flavor that can be grated like Parmesan, has won numerous local, national and international competitions.

According to Chickie Vella, her cheeses stand out because they are made in a stone building that harbours living organisms. Another trick: Vella buys only a local dairy’s first milking. It’s then poured slowly to prevent bruising. For the prize-winning Dry Monterrey Jack, the curds are wrapped in muslin cheesecloth and rolled by hand into rounds. After the rounds are weighted down, they take the shape of a wheel. The cheese is coated in a soybean, black pepper cocoa mixture that prevents cracks and protects it while it ages, for at least seven months.

All Vella cheeses are made by hand, as they have been since the company was founded in 1931. “Funny thing,” says Vella. “We are considered an artisan cheesemaker because we don’t use machines, but this is the way we have always done things. We’re artisans by default.”

Before Sheana Davis started making her own cheeses, she ran a marketing company that helped promote local cheesemakers and other Sonoma-area naturally grown food producers. “I was helping to take great quality produce to food-based cities from Portland to Austin to New York,” she says, noting that a distributor in Brooklyn is one of her best customers.

One of her clients back in the day was a start-up that has joined the ranks of world-class cheesemakers from the region. Cowgirl Creamery started in 1997, the creation of two female lifelong friends who had worked for years among the Bay Area’s top restaurants and were looking for new challenges. They started in Point Reyes, a coastal town on scenic Highway 1 about an hour north of San Francisco. At first they bought local produce to sell to Bay Area chefs. But soon they switched to making cheese, relying on a nearby organic dairy.

“It all starts with the milk,” says Michael Zilber, a former IT specialist who manages Cowgirl’s award-winning Point Reyes operation. “You can’t make great cheese with bad milk.”

And, as in politics, all cheese is local. Zilber says Cowgirl’s popular Red Hawk is a triple-cream cheese from the milk of local cows that eat grass nurtured by the distinctive minerals of the coastal shore. “You can’t make this same cheese even a few miles inland,” he says.

But Cowgirl’s best seller is an even richer triple cream called Mt. Tam. Like Red Hawk, it also has won the gold medal from the American Cheese Society. Says Zilber: “It’s a socially acceptable way of eating a stick of butter.”

And, yes, it goes down smoothly with a glass of any number of prized local wines.

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